On a vacation to Washington D.C. with his foster parents, young Clark Kent (aka Superboy) expresses thanks for the Kryptonese rocket having landed in America. After admiring the Declaration of Independence, they notice an issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette with the headline “Kents Perish at Party Local Family Dies” and the large engraving is–of them.
With the Kents, Clark must investigate the strange circumstances. The Boy of Steel searches old hulks of colonial merchant ships for perfectly preserved clothes they can wear when they step out of the protective plastic bubble upon arrival in “quaint” Philadelphia.
Clever clean-cut Clark pays a call to the proprietor of the Pennsylvania Gazette, none other than Benjamin Franklin, to ask for work. Beguiled by Clark’s quoting aphorisms from Poor Richard’s Almanac, Franklin signs him on as a reporter.
His first assignment is to cover the midnight ride of Paul Revere, but when he gets to the old North Church, one of the lanterns is dark and there’s no time to relight it the ordinary way. Superboy reignites the wick with his heat vision, so Revere will get the correct signal, which will not really alter history. Franklin can’t understand how he got the scoop, but that won’t stop him from getting the story out first.
A few weeks later, Franklin goes off to the signing of the Declaration. Superboy follows him and hides in a closet to watch the historic event—which almost doesn’t happen, because John Hancock has sprained his hand. Moving faster than the human eye can see, the lad holds Hancock’s hand and guides the quill so he can sign as boldly as possible.
Oh no! The window is opened to let in some fresh air and a gust of wind blows the precious document outside the building and towards the Liberty Bell. Superboy succeeds in recapturing the Declaration, but the bell starts to ring out for freedom and cracks when it strikes his superhard body. There’s no time to change back into his street clothes. The red cape is mistaken for a British uniform as he is nearly shot down after delivering the document to Jefferson.
There’s no time to rest—the evening is stormy and Franklin is eager to test his theory about electricity. Kent’s telescopic vision shows that there’s not enough string to carry the kite up to the clouds, so he manages once again to slip away, get into his blue and red suit, and extend the kite string bearing the key with wire made from nails, stretched long and thing with his superstrength. Franklin amazes his guests that evening.
Suddenly Kent realizes that he and his foster parents must have disappeared during the Boston Tea Party, so he must dispel any suspicions that they are British spies and arrange for their safe travel back home to Smallville. His foster parents are troubled by the inconvenient fact that their adventure to the past is riddled with historical inaccuracies. A cosmic cloud “caused a freak reaction with the time barrier—and affected our senses!” Luckily the people they met in the past were unaffected by the cosmic cloud because they did not time travel. The Clarks still made history because a copy of the Pennsylvania Gazelle was somehow preserved by his super breath and was now on display in the gallery they visited.
At the end of the episode, Superman invited young readers to go to the King Bros. Sells & Gray circus when it stopped at Palisades Amusement Park in April, with five different discount coupons as added incentive…
Category Archives: 20th century
Christopher Orr’s Funny Animal Alphabet on an Unmentionable Subject
This June a Research Grant recipient is in residence looking at alphabets in the reading room. Not just a handful, but as many as possible—and Cotsen has literally hundreds, even thousands. All the paging promises the fun of discovering something new in the collection. It took a little time to chase down this print, an alphabet that also refers to Noah’s Ark, making it squarely in scope for Cotsen. The wry contents note mentioning “excrement” written by the donor’s private librarian signaled that the print was something out of the ordinary.
The panel in the lower right hand corner announces that this is the third printing of “A-Z” below a whimsically scratchy illustration of a whale swimming parallel to Noah’s ark, the animals heads hanging over the gunwhales. Floating to the left of Noah holding his nose is the caption “Imagine what the smell there must have been,” a thought which has probably occurred to most people between the ages of four and eighty-four if they bother to think very hard about the logistics of keeping two of every species in crowded quarters for over a month.
Now look at the subjects for “A,” “B,” and “C, which are “Ant poo, Bear smells, Cat’s nasty’s.” The merriment continues with “hedgehog pellets,” “llama lumps,” “owl do-dads, “rabbit currants” all the way to “zebra manure.”
When the print maker Chris Orr (1943-) printed the sheet in 1987, he had not been elected Royal Academician or appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire. His Wikipedia biography (Christopher there) soberly describes him as an “English artist and print maker who has exhibited worldwide and published over 400 limited edition prints in lithography, etching, and silkscreen” in the collections of the British Museum, the Tate and the Victoria and Albert, to name just a few. And he has collaborated with Michael Palin on several publications. These achievements are humorously undercut with the comment:
During my thirty nine years as an artist I have been put in various pigeon-holes, such as ‘quintessential English’ or a ‘latter-day Hogarth‘. But are these epithets reasonable? My pictures are composed of well-mixed metaphors, references, allusions, jokes and descriptions. Does ‘Chris Orr-like’ refer to a typically English muddle? The tradition of graphic eccentricity (Heath Robinson, Donald McGill, Steve Bell et al.) is fair enough…

